
I lass 
Book 



£?<£? 




I'K'I SI.NTKI) ll\ 



Abraham Lincoln 



A ifemnrtai Atorcsa 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR 

THE EXTENSION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING, 

IN WITHERSPOON HALL, 

PHILADELPHIA, FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 

FEBRUARY 12, 1909 



By 
ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 

President of Lafayette College 



* 



PHILADELPHIA 
1909 






i — -... 






University Extension Society 



ICittroltt (Etftttaanj Hating 

Friday Afternoon, February 12, 1909 

at 3 o'clock 

in wltherspoon hall 



Chairman, MR. ISAAC H. CLOTHIER 



PROGRAM 

Prayer Rev. Robert Johnston 

Introductory Remarks by the Chairman 

Keller's American Hymn 

Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania 

" Memories of Lincoln " (Whitman) 

Mr. Llewellyn Powys of Cambridge University 

Kipling's Recessional 

Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania 

The Gettysburg Address Mr. Isaac H. Clothier 

Lowell's Tribute to Lincoln (Commemoration Ode) 

Dr. J. Duncan Spaeth of Princeton University 

Address on Lincoln 

President E. D. Warfield of Lafayette College 

America 

Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania and Audience 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY 
MR. ISAAC H. CLOTHIER, CHAIRMAN. 

HAVING accepted, perhaps without due meditation, 
the duty of this hour, I approach its performance 
with extreme diffidence and distrust, growing out 
of a profound appreciation of the vastness of the subject, 
and the dignity and solemnity of the occasion. 

This day marks the rounded century since the birth of 
the greatest American. It seems almost inconceivable that 
Abraham Lincoln passed from life a half-century ago, — 
lacking seven years — at the early age of fifty-six, nowadays 
scarcely accounted as the full maturity of ripened man- 
hood. As I look into the faces of this gathering of 
earnest men and women, I realize there is a small minority 
here who, like myself, remember seeing the great President 
in person, but to the large majority he is but an historic 
character, something already immense and increasing in 
stature as the years go by, but he is not, nor can he be a 
close personal presence as we always think of those, our 
contemporaries, whom we saw and loved in life. Since 
Lincoln died there has come into existence, especially 
during the last twenty-five years, a vast literature concern- 
ing him, surpassed in volume, perhaps, only by the cele- 
brated Napoleonic literature relating to one prodigy of 
human genius, — utterly divorced from conscience, — and 
including the history of Europe during an eventful period; 
and this literature has been the growth of three-quarters of 
a century. I cannot hope to add a single line of value to 
the Lincoln literature, but as one of the rapidly narrowing 
circle who saw Abraham Lincoln in the flesh, perhaps my 



own most limited but intensely real recollections may find 
a place this centenary day. 

I first heard of him when I was a youth, in 1858, when 
the memorable debate took place during the canvass for 
the Illinois Senatorship between him and Stephen A. 
Douglas. The former was almost unknown outside of his 
own State of Illinois, but his opponent was justly esteemed 
a giant in debate, having met and worsted in the arena of 
the United States Senate the other giants of those days, 
who, even though his superiors in intellectual equipment 
and scholarly statesmanship, dreaded his wonderful mental 
agility and his almost unequaled skill as a ready debater. 
The unknown backwoods lawyer, lacking as he came to 
manhood, even an ordinary common school education, 
seemed in advance like a baby in his hands, but with 
straightforward, plain honesty of speech, devoid of rhetori- 
cal skill or the trained debater's subtlety, to the astonish- 
ment of the nation he overcame his distinguished opponent, 
and was crowned victor by the nation and the world! 
From this time he was a national figure, though for some 
time longer little known personally outside his own State. 
In February, i860, he came to New York by invitation, 
and all the chief men of the metropolis crowded Cooper 
Institute to see this new great man, the uncouth giant of 
the West. S 

As Joseph H. Choate, then a young man, tells us of 
that evening : 

" It was a great audience, including all the noted men- 
all the learned and cultured — of his party in New York: 
editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants, critics' 
They were all very curious to hear him. His fame as a 
powerful speaker had preceded him. When Mr. Bryant 
presented him, on the high platform of the Cooper Insti- 
tute, a vast sea of eager upturned faces greeted him, full of 
intense curiosity to see what this rude child of the people 

6 



was like. He was equal to the occasion. When he spoke 
he was transformed ; his eyes kindled, his voice rang, his 
face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. 
For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow 
of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery 
were severely simple. What Lowell called ' The grand 
simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, 
were reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at orna- 
ment or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke 
straight to the point. If any came expecting the turgid 
eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have 
been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utter- 
ances. It was marvelous to see how this untutored man, 
by mere self discipline and the chastening of his own 
spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his 
own way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. 
That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city, 
rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he 
who had come as a stranger departed with the laurels of a 
great triumph." 

That year, i860, was eventful in the history of the 
nation ; the great slavery contest had been on for many 
years, and was then approaching its historic culmination, 
when the institution went down in fire and blood. The 
Republican party, born four years before, was by the inex- 
orable logic of events coming to its own ; the question was, 
who should be its standard bearer during the crucial period 
in the life of the nation on which we were about to enter. 

The Republican Convention met in June, and a half- 
dozen prominent Republicans were placed in nomina- 
tion, including Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, Mr. Bates, Judge 
McLean, and Mr. Lincoln, but the contest was really only 
between Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln. All eyes were fixed 
on the former, the undoubted leader of his party, the great 
statesman of the period; and as his opponent had only just 

7 



come into the national attention, the nomination of Mr. 
Seward was regarded almost a certainty, and to the worldly- 
wise no other result seemed reasonable. But mighty, though 
unseen forces were silently working, and the hand of God 
was leading the nation. On the third ballot, this man from 
the lowest order of the people, was named the standard 
bearer to the astonishment of the world, and the solemn 
march of events proceeded. That political campaign can 
never be forgotten by those who are privileged to remember 
it. The " Wide- Awakes " were organized all over the 
North and marching by tens of thousands, with lanterns 
and uniforms, were precursors of the armed regiments that 
a few months later sprang into existence at Lincoln's call to 
take part in the great conflict of the century. 

Then came the election (how proud I was to cast my 
first vote, and for Abraham Lincoln), and in due course the 
inauguration. Mr. Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia on 
February 21st, on his way to Washington. At the home 
of a friend, on Sixteenth Street above Chestnut, I saw him 
pass in an open barouche, and I remember the surprise 
with which I saw the newly-grown whiskers on the face 
which up to that time had always been closely shaven. He 
stood in the barouche as he passed, and removed his hat, 
and I had a deliberate and impressive view of his tall 
figure and most expressive countenance, which I have never 
forgotten. That night he stayed at the Continental Hotel, 
and the news came to him of his proposed assassination in 
Baltimore. Next morning at 6.30 I was at the Ninth 
Street door of the hotel when he came out with the com- 
mittee and took his seat in an open barouche on his way to 
raise the flag at Independence Hall. A cordon of police 
surrounded the carriage, but I succeeded in obtaining a place 
w here I walked shoulder to shoulder with one of the officers, 
exactly opposite, and only a few feet from his person. I 
walked down Chestnut Street observing him carefully, and 

8 



listening to his scant conversation till at Sixth Street I was 
crowded out of my place. The procession rounded the 
corner, and the party alighted and passed through Inde- 
pendence Square, and soon appeared on the platform in 
front of Independence Hall. I stood as near as the great 
crowd permitted, and saw him plainly and watched him 
carefully in the delivery of his short address, and his 
raising of the flag. 

I never saw him again in life. 

Four years and two months after I saw his great 
funeral which seemed to include the whole nation, as it 
proceeded from city to city on its way to the tomb at 
Springfield, Illinois. The day after its arrival in Phila- 
delphia, his body lay in state in Independence Hall, and I 
was privileged to have rather a deliberate view. In that 
four years, he who was at the time of his election almost 
despised by the so-called great men of the day, had grown 
to be truly a historic figure, beside which the then great 
men of the times became pigmies by comparison. As 
Stanton, who had a few years before greatly undervalued 
him, said with deep emotion, after watching all night at his 
bedside, and just after the breath had left his body : 
He belongs now to the ages. 

And again, 

There lies the greatest master of men the world has 
ever known. 

I said at the outset ot my remarks, that Abraham 
Lincoln is esteemed the first American. No one would 
undervalue the name of Washington, truly the Father of 
his Country, and his place in history and in the minds of 
all Americans cannot be filled by any other. But Wash- 
ington was not of the people ; he came of a distinguished 
ancestry and into an inheritance of wealth, culture, and 
exceptional opportunity. We have for him — and our 

9 



posterity must always have — a reverential admiration, not 
unmixed with awe, but in which affection can scarcely be 
said to have a place, and we must ever regard him as a 
severely majestic, unapproachable figure. 

Abraham Lincoln was of the mold of the common 
people. 

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth, 
The tang and odor of the primal things. 

When we review his extraordinary career, and the 
history of the nation at that time, can we believe otherwise 
than that a special Providence surrounded him and this 
nation in that wonderful epoch ? A backwoodsman, with- 
out even a common school education, homely of feature 
and ungainly in person, with everything in appearance 
against him, he came to the front in a great national crisis 
and shamed the trained statesmanship and the scholarly 
culture of the period with his inexorable logic and his 
command of the purest English, some extracts from which 
will be read on this occasion, and which are among the 
finest specimens of our English prose. These marvelous 
expressions came not from the scholarly and cultured 
Sumner, or Phillips, or Motley, with generations of culture 
behind them, nor from the President of Harvard Uni- 
versity, but from the rail-splitter, trained amid the roughest 
surroundings, who, notwithstanding, proved to be the 
genius of common sense and the embodiment of the 
American conscience of the period. 

Conway said of one of Emerson's sentences, that it 
" was like the hand of God upon his shoulder." May we 
not say of some of Lincoln's immortal phrases, that they 
were the warning voice of God stirring the conscience of 
the nation, as for instance — "If slavery is not wrong, 
nothing is wrong." A moral and philosophical argument 
in eight words. 

10 



George William Curtis, speaking of Wendell Phillips 
at Fanueil Hall, said : "It was that greatest of oratorical 
triumphs when a supreme emotion lifted the orator to 
adequate expression. Three such scenes are illustrious in 
our history — Patrick Henry's electrical defiance of George 
the III., in the Continental Congress; Wendell Phillips in 
Fanueil Hall, and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg — three, 
and there is no fourth. They transmit, unextinguished, 
the torch of an eloquence which has aroused nations and 
changed the course of history." 

The occasion is an inspiration, but with the program 
before us, for me to extend unduly, would be without 
excuse. 

The years and the decades have passed, " without haste 
and without rest," and now the second century dawns. 
Through its course the American people must cherish with 
pride and deep emotion the remembrance of the mighty 
triumph and the mighty sacrifice with which the name of 
the great emancipator will be forever blended, and the robust 
example which the first American must remain to the young 
men of America, while the memory of his life and death are 
cherished by the nation; and will that not be until the now 
great Republic, — the hope of mankind — unmindful of its 
glorious mission in the world, and disregarding the precious 
lesson of Abraham Lincoln's life, shall forfeit its birthright 
and its costly regeneration, and unworthily lose its place 
among the nations of the earth ? May that time never 
come. 



ii 



MEMORIAL ADDRESS 

By ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

HOW inscrutable are the ways of Providence, and 
who can foretell the destiny of men ? Who 
could have dreamed that the child who, on the 
twelfth of February, 1809, was born in the barrens of 
Kentucky, of illiterate parentage, poor and in the humblest 
walk of life, would grow up to be not only a leader of 
men ; not only the emancipator of oppressed and suffering 
millions ; not only the guardian and conservator of our 
national union; but one who should combine in himself 
all these lofty destinies and be the very embodiment of 
one of the purest, noblest and most unselfish movements 
which have been recorded upon the pages of human 
history ? Who should become all this, without for a 
moment losing the marks of his origin ; without ceasing 
to be the man of the people : without seeking, or even 
wishing to cut the ties which bound him to the people 
from whom he sprang, and to whom he never ceased to 
belong ? And that a great nation, bound together through 
the wisdom of his statesmanship, would celebrate the one 
hundredth anniversary of his birth ? 

In the form and character of Abraham Lincoln there 
was nothing of the hero of romance : but there was much 
of the hero of every day life. There was nothing to catch 
the imagination, no beauty of person, no grace, no wealth 
poured out by the lavish hand of nature or of art : but 

!3 



much to seize the intellect and lay hold upon the heart in 
the quiet, genial, melancholy man who loved his country 
better than his life. 

I need not tell again his story. Born in Kentucky, 
taken to Indiana in his childhood, thence to Illinois, for a 
time a flatboatman on the Mississippi, then the keeper of 
a country store, doing all that he did with his might, active, 
alert, interested in everything which went on about him, 
quick to learn, ready to apply all that he learned to the 
problems constantly presented by life in a new state in 
times of great excitement. One by one he shook off the 
shackles which bound him, first the link of contentment 
with the life of narrow struggle for mere existence ; then 
that of illiteracy ; then that of poverty ; till at last strong 
in the consciousness of a growing manhood he began to 
make an impression on his friends and neighbors and to 
give the first proof of his power to lead men. One thing 
however it is worth while to note : Lincoln was a self 
educated man ; by which I do not mean that he was an 
uneducated man, but that he was educated, and that he 
educated himself. We are told with what difficulty he 
obtained books ; and with what devotion he toiled over 
them. Happily the greatest of books fell early into his 
hands, captivated his mind and glorified his literary style. 
We are told also with what pains he practised composi- 
tion. When he had no paper, planing bits of shingle he 
wrote essays upon them. He himself tells us how he 
sought to express himself in the fewest possible words in 
order that he might get as much as possible upon his 
shingle. A good training this; training in those important 
principles of composition — brevity, conciseness, directness. 
Not only so but he studied the influence of what he wrote 
upon others, reading his compositions to them, committing 
them and delivering them as speeches, and also speaking 
extempore in the field and about the village store, always 

H 






carefully noting the effect of what he said upon his hearers. 
Again and again when he saw anything which struck him 
he wrote down comments upon it, little moral homilies 
upon his companions, and their ways, upon the virtues and 
vices which appeared in the rural community where he 
lived ; essays brief as those of Bacon : less eloquent, less 
elegant, less elevated than those famous essays, but sharing 
with them their greatest excellences, brevity and insight. 
In this school he learned two things : to know himself and 
to know his fellow men. Only a class it is true, the plain 
men and women of America, but the reservoir of power in 
a democratic country. First and last he proved how well 
he understood them and how capable he was of leading 
them to the performance of a great and glorious work. 
It was not till the summer of 1858 that Lincoln 
attracted national notice. From the date of the repeal 
of the Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery north 
of 36 deg. 30' north latitude, there had been a steady 
pro-slavery reaction. The Dred Scott case had deeply 
accentuated this. The South was desperately in earnest. 
The North having temporized seemed more and more 
likely to give way. Of the northern men who favored a 
policy of laissez /aire with respect to the South's peculiar 
institution no one after the President was more prominent, 
not even he was so notable, as Stephen A. Douglas of 
Illinois. Douglas had been a leader in the reactionary 
step of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, he was now a bold and 
unscrupulous defender of its policy, and as a candidate for 
re-election to the Senate in the winter of 1858 he truckled 
to the South and its demand of "room for slavery." 
Lincoln was by general consent brought forward by the 
Republicans of Illinois to oppose Douglas. Debates 
were arranged between the two champions and attracted 
the deepest interest throughout the land. Douglas was a 
dangerous antagonist. Possessed of high qualities of mind, 

l 5 



and a most forcible speaker; he possessed also, and used 
without scruple, all the arts of the politician. No one 
played with more skilled hand upon popular prejudices ; 
no one more shrewdly preached peace, peace, where there 
was no peace ; no one was more capable of making the 
worse appear the better cause. But he found in Lincoln 
one who was scarcely less a master of assemblies and even 
more a master of the hearts of men, not however on 
account of an equal mastery of the art of chicane, but 
through his "brave, old wisdom of sincerity." Indeed 
his imperturbable good nature, his quiet force of character, 
his stern, rough-hewn loyalty, already began to change 
the noble policy he espoused, from a mere moral sentiment 
to a bugle blast calling men to action. In the very first 
speech of the campaign Lincoln declared in words of 
prophetic import: "A house divided against itself cannot 
stand. I believe that this government cannot endure 
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect 
the Union to be dissolved: I do not expect the house to 
fall: but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It 
will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the 
opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it 
and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief 
that it is in course of ultimate extinction or its advocates 
will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in 
all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South." 
Such language though not uncommon for the past thirty 
years on the passionate lips of Calhoun and his South 
Carolina constituents, though not unknown to the more 
impassioned advocates of abolition in the North, was 
new in the calm assertion of policy of a clear-headed, 
unsensational northern politician. It brought upon him 
the fiercest assaults of his political opponents and awoke 
doubt and fears in the breasts of many of his own party. 
From that day the die was cast. From that day the 

16 



problem grew more and more clear in its statement, and 
always more and more closely approximated Lincoln's 
statement. With him it was never to be first and before 
all else a struggle for emancipation : but a struggle for a 
Union freed from the great cause of dissension. With 
him it was never to be a struggle for Union only, but 
Union with liberty. 

Abolitionists might distrust and oppose him, conserva- 
tive, reactionary, pro-slavery, union men might refuse his 
lead ; but he never faltered, though he often went forward 
with infinite patience. He held the famous sentiment of 
Jackson: "The Union: it must be preserved ;" and not 
less the great language which Jefferson made use of in the 
Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal, 
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness : " and held them in the spirit of Webster 
who in his reply to Hayne had declared the sentiment 
of every true American heart — " Liberty and Union, now 
and forever, one and inseparable." 

There was nothing of the rhetorician in his utterances. 
It was their almost judicial calmness which made them 
seem so rash to conservatives. It was their air of decisive 
finality which made the abolitionists of the extremer views 
conclude that he was unfitted to be their standard bearer. 
As the summer of i860 approached it looked as though 
he was the choice of no party or faction because he had so 
confidently chosen the via media. But when the conven- 
tion met in Chicago for the nomination of a Republican 
candidate for the Presidency it was obvious to all men that 
the time was ripe for the Republican party. How could 
the golden opportunity best be seized. Lincoln, the man 
who had chosen the via media ; Lincoln, the man who had 
spoken boldly, but never rashly ; Lincoln, the man whom 
some doubted because he was too characterless to have 

17 






bitter enemies, whom others wanted because he would be a 
conservative man at the head of a radical party — received 
the nomination on the third ballot, because as men said, he 
was " available." The South was stirred by it. This was 
the man who had forced Douglas by the overwhelming 
power of his denunciation of the proslavery attitude to 
take a position which had destroyed him in the South : 
if he could lead the pliant and politic Douglas thus far, 
how far would he lead the antislavery northern men, how 
far would he not go under the urging of the impatient 
abolitionists. Neither party knew the man they had to 
deal with : he did not himself dream of the splendid 
heights of manhood and statesmanship to which he was to 
climb before his work should be accomplished. 

He took one step at a time. Infinite patience was 
united to absolute sincerity. Courage was joined in happy 
wedlock with conscience. One step at a time and not one 
backward. 

The country realized as '60 darkened to its close that 
the long dreaded crisis was at hand. The inevitable conflict 
which Calhoun had preached, almost as a crusade, for a 
generation, was at hand. Men doubted if the ties which 
bound state to state could survive the shock. Philosophers, 
with sage assumption, told of the instability of republics ; 
historians ransacked the records of the past and produced 
endless lists of false analogies to support the theories of 
the philosophers ; jurists pronounced the constitution 
fundamentally feeble ; politicians met in conventions 
threatening dire things if the tool of antislavery fanaticism 
should be elevated to the presidency ; self satisfied patriots 
wept and wrung their hands that men should dream of 
placing a "mountebank," a "mere western joker," in the 
chair of the chief executive in such a crisis. 

It was a time to try men's souls. There was no lack 
of men who wanted to save the country. There was only 

18 



a lack of those who saw clearly how to do it. Many 
thought they saw the way. Doctrinaires, blind leaders of 
the blind. When was there ever a lack of quacks with 
nostrums fitted for every emergency ? calculated to correct 
the finances, to abolish poverty, and to introduce peace 
among parties ? Lincoln was not one of these wiseacres. 
He said plainly that he did not see just how the country 
was to be saved, but there was a way, and he was ready to 
try to find it. 

It is not for us to criticise the men who stood abashed 
before the problem. Men as wise, as brave, as loyal as 
we, faltered and failed. The specious pleas of Douglas 
satisfied many ; the middle way of Bell seemed safe and 
sure to many a loyal Fabian ; the courtly Breckinridge, 
manly, earnest, eloquent, seemed to the Southern mind 
not only loyal, but right; in such company was it necessary 
to follow the gaunt figure of the Illinois leader? What 
did he know of statesmanship ? What experience had he 
to fit him to take the helm in such a gale ? Yet the storm 
gathered round him. There was something so blunt and 
straightforward about him that the South went into a 
frenzy at his candidacy. This was no Don Quixote riding 
a joust at windmills. This man was in deadly earnest and 
somehow he had gotten the world to recognize this, and 
not only so, but that this was a time to be in earnest. 
Having lost their favorite analogy for abolitionists, the 
South now sought to call him for the servant instead of 
the master, Sancho Panza ! Perhaps after all, in the 
homely, practical philosophy of that much misunderstood 
character there was a touch much akin to the genius of 
this new birth of the crude West. How it should fit the 
occasion remained to be seen. 

Meanwhile vituperation was winning him notice and 
giving him more and more importance in the campaign. 
The reaction towards pro-slavery views which had begun 

i9 



in 1854 gradually spent itself and the counter movement, 
which made slow progress at first, advanced with tremendous 
force in i860 and culminated on November 6th when it 
became evident that Lincoln by some subtle alchemy 
had welded the sundered factions in the North into a 
triumphant party. 

For a time the country seemed to stand aghast at what 
it had done. In the South the news of his election was 
like a tocsin of war. South Carolina fulfilled her threat 
of years standing, which the country had come to think 
but a cry of "wolf." The national government was 
paralysed. The disaffected states one by one began to 
wheel into line. What was the spell of this baleful 
conjurer at the mere whisper of whose coming a great 
nation fell into ruins ? 

It was mere panic terror. That there were men high 
in his party who wanted to destroy slavery root and 
branch was true. It was also true that these men did 
not believe that Mr. Lincoln could be counted on in 
this work, — certainly not for immediate action. But his 
election, such was the declaration of South Carolina, "was 
a menace to the South's peculiar institution." A menace? 
Had not higher things than this been menaced and the 
country left unshattered ? Had not personal liberty been 
menaced by the institution of slavery ? Had not peace 
and good government been menaced by South Carolina on 
account of the tariff act of 1828 ? Was not the integrity 
of the Union, surely a higher and a dearer possession than 
a few slaves were they men or chattels, menaced by her 
ordinances of secession itself? Yet they declared that this 
" western attorney " was a menace to this great country ; 
and asked if it were not better that he should die than 
that the country should be imperiled. Men asked this 
question with compressed lips and gleaming eyes. News- 
papers asked it with fiery threats. But those who asked 

20 



were plainly more intent on hurrying on the work of 
disintegration than ot staying it. The calm, thoughtful 
man on whom the work of restoring each shattered column 
to its former place, of maintaining each staunch one where 
it stood, of preserving our national temple in all its 
unspoiled symmetry, took no heed of threats, but waited 
patiently his time. 

How his great heart must have bled as he saw the 
disintegration going on with not a hand raised to stop 
it. His task was being made harder every day by the 
feebleness of Buchanan's administration. Like a tiny 
stream eating through the levees which hold the great 
Mississippi in bounds the little thread of disunion senti- 
ment spread. The little trickling stream fast became a 
broad destroying flood. How long would it take till all the 
South should be submerged? Think of the man sitting 
at his home waiting, waiting, till he could legally spring 
forward to fill the breach and check the torrent ! 

The scene naturally suggests the last days of the 
Roman Republic. The picture which Cicero has left us in 
his letters of the way he sat and watched the swift decay 
of his beloved country, the hopeless attitude of the con- 
servatives, the patient hopefulness of the few who had they 
but a leader ready might have saved the state. Pompey 
was as futile as our own ineffectual President. The party 
of order waited then when it might have struck. Lincoln 
and his party might have struck when they waited. But 
he was as sagacious as he was patient. It was eternal law ; 
not merely civil, but moral law, for which he stood. He 
could wait for years, he could endure anything, rather than 
sully the great principle of " liberty under law," whose 
champion he was. 

Amid breathless excitement the eventful day drew on. 
Threats and curses fell thicker and thicker upon him. 
Offers of escort from various military organizations came 



21 



to him. But he disregarded the one and declined the 
other. He was still a private citizen. He would travel 
alone and protected only by conscious rectitude of purpose 
in the serene contempt which the earnest feel for bluster 
and braggadocio. The whole country watched with breath- 
less excitement his progress to Washington. Every loyal 
breast breathed a sigh of relief when the oath of office was 
taken and the affairs of the nation were safely in his hands. 
His inaugural address with its simplicity, seriousness, and 
impression of resolute purpose created the greatest confi- 
dence in the North. It was received with derisive mockery 
in the South — " Whom the gods would destroy, they first 
make mad." 

With a cabinet representing no faction, with a broad 
declaration of an earnest intention to maintain both the 
constitution and the Union in their entirety, Lincoln 
began the four years of his terrible struggle with over- 
whelming odds. 

As we look back upon those years we do not see how 
wofully hopeless the struggle was now and again ; we do 
not see how nearly alone the President stood. It was ap- 
parent from the outset that he was to be the tool of no party 
and of no faction. His immense personality rose slowly 
but surely above the surging crowd of lesser men. Men 
struggled to hold him back, men struggled to push him 
forward ; men chafed at his delay, men cried out against his 
precipitancy ; men denounced him as false to his promises, 
as Machiavellian in his duplicity. Unaffected by it all he 
strode forward to his goal. It seems incredible to us now 
that he should have been so misunderstood, opposed, 
thwarted, even by his closest advisers. But gradually men 
saw the master in him and so soon as this was clearly seen 
he became powerful for good. The weight of care and 
responsibility was thenceforth never to be lifted from his 
shoulders. What wonder then that he should grow into 

22 



the type of man we know ; deliberate, patient, self- 
contained, given at times to long periods of thoughtful 
silence, deeply tinged with melancholy. Those who were 
near to him tell us that he was wont at times to sit for 
hours absorbed in thought, looking neither to the right nor 
to the left. And yet through it all, no hasty act broke the 
serene dignity of his life, no unmeasured word revealed 
the over burdened spirit, he moved with the unswerving 
certainty of one of nature's forces to his goal. 

No man in the world's history ever passed through so 
great a crisis with more simple, unpretentious manliness. 
Men watched his progress with ever increasing wonder and 
admiration. Day by day he revealed new qualities. Fresh 
problems constantly confronted him, inherently difficult 
and often rendered almost impossible of successful solution 
by the want of unity in his supporters. But each demand 
upon him seemed to create the power to meet it. He 
grew in resources almost hourly. Like the athlete in train- 
ing, his powers of mind took on a new strength with each 
exertion. Thus was revealed his wonderful reserves of 
mental and moral power. No one dreamed how much 
power he possessed. Nor would it have been natural if 
they had. Lincoln said of himself: "I claim not to have 
controlled events, but confess plainly that events have con- 
trolled me." Had he tried to control the events of those 
stormy years it would have made ruin inevitable. All he 
could hope to do was to meet each problem as it presented 
itself with the utmost resources which he could command 
and direct it as far as possible. He battled bravely with 
each and all ; he often had to be content with only half 
what he strove for, but he made no concessions. 

No episode in his career has been so misunderstood 
as his management of the slavery question. Even many 
who are well content with the result cannot to this day 
see the plain practical logic of events which controlled his 

2? 



policy in this matter. The position which he took in the 
first inaugural recognized the right of property in the 
slaves of the South, the legality of the fugitive slave 
legislation, and seemed to place him in accord with the 
views of the Union men of the border states. Personal 
pledges too were given that he had no thought of destroy- 
ing property in slaves. These pledges were generally 
conditional and those to whom they were given never 
fulfilled their part, but they did not refrain for that reason 
from casting stones at him. That his declared policy was 
his actual policy there is no just ground to doubt. That 
he afterwards abandoned it does not prove the contrary. 
The captain who is forced under stress of weather to cast 
his cargo overboard does not thereby prove that when he 
left port he meant to abandon it. In '61 there was 
enough to do without assailing outright the possession of 
slaves ; the urgent demand was to stop the extension of 
slavery in the territories, a task, which a wise man might 
well think enough for present thought. And Mr. Lincoln 
was not the man to anticipate. True, he was utterly without 
fear; ready to undertake whatever was necessary; blind 
some thought to the real peril; but pacification without 
sacrifice of principle was his first aim. 

To this generation it seems that the day had fully come 
for the axe to be laid to the root of the tree ; that no 
greater evil than a patched up truce, leaving the great 
issue unsettled could have happened to the country. But 
the prayer "Give peace in our time, O Lord," is a very 
natural petition and one to which the heart of every lover 
of his country will respond with a deep amen ! So there 
were few Union men in 1 86 1 who would not have been 
glad to have had peace on the basis of the status quo. So 
well was this understood that the South did not believe 
that the North would fight at all. At a conference of 
Confederate officers held early in 1 86 1 the duration of 

24 



hostilities was discussed and Robert Toombs declared that 
in six weeks the North would abandon the struggle. 
When Basil Duke, then a young officer from Missouri, 
afterwards a dashing General of Cavalry, " the brains of 
Morgan's command," ventured to question this view he 
was heard with amazement and derision. 

Lincoln delayed long. He sternly repressed unsanc- 
tioned acts of emancipation by army officers. At last 
when emancipation came, it came when it could be justified. 
The armies had rallied from defeat and were generally 
victorious ; the Confederates after ample warning had per- 
sisted in resistance to regularly constituted authority ; the 
act itself is amply justifiable as a war measure. The 
methods of its execution are above criticism. 

The justness of the destruction of any kind of property 
in time of peace by an amendment to the Constitution 
might be doubted — if the right of ownership in that 
property were fundamentally wrong and injurious to the 
Republic it ought not to be doubted. Such was the form 
in which the proposition must have eventually come before 
the country had not the South precipitated the conflict. 
It is written " that he who taketh the sword shall perish by 
the sword." The administration accepted the appeal, the 
arbitrament according to all the rules of war was regularly 
determined. 

If any objection can be found to the action of the 
President it can only be from that class from which I 
spring, the Southern Union slaveholders. I thank God 
that my father and grandfathers while yielding to the evil 
of the social order in which their lives were cast consistently 
opposed it, and actively favored emancipation. To such 
men it might have seemed as if they were being punished 
for the sins of others ; how much more true is it to say 
that it was their privilege to surrender so much for their 
fatherland. 

'5 



The country has not only long ago acquiesced, but 
joyfully acquiesced, in this part of Lincoln's work. There 
can be little doubt that when History sets her seal upon it, 
it will be that of highest approval. 

While the war was going on, with alternation of the 
bitterness of defeat and the pain of triumph over brethren ; 
while the slavery problem was being cautiously worked 
out ; one of the most serious complications of foreign 
affairs which we have ever had to face was demanding the 
utmost diplomacy. France and England, partly misunder- 
standing, partly misconstruing, wholly ready to profit by 
our misfortunes, hung about our shores. We were fully 
occupied at home, it seemed as if they might treat us as 
they would. By a judicious mingling of boldness with 
prudence ; by decision in action coupled with the utmost 
discretion and moderation in speech ; Lincoln weathered the 
storm and placed us in a condition to demand as a powerful 
and once more united nation that reparation which we had 
declared we should seek. The outside world — perhaps 
unconscious of the immensity of the tasks at home — have 
agreed in pronouncing the diplomatic triumphs of this ad- 
ministration the most admirable of Lincoln's achievements. 

While Lincoln was still alive Lowell compared him to 
Henry IV. of France — Henry of Navarre. He said of 
Henry, "that he was as full of wise saws and modern 
instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the 
thoughtful, practical, human, and thoroughly earnest man, 
around whom the fragments of France were to gather them- 
selves till she took her place again as a planet of the first 
magnitude in the European system." To my mind the 
comparison is more specious than real. And it fails most 
in just this point. Henry gave way to outside pressure, 
sacrificed principle to policy, a great cause to personal 
advantage. Henry, indeed, consolidated France politically, 
but it was a triumph of the lower element the fruits of 

26 



which his grandson reaped when he repealed the edict of 
Nantes. Henry, indeed, built up a great and splendid 
dynasty for himself but at the cost of building it on the 
sands, and when the French and Spanish Bourbons seemed 
to have their heads in the skies the winds smote upon 
them and the result is known and read of all men. It was 
as if Lincoln had yielded to the slave interest, had accepted 
that condition of which he earlier spoke and saved the 
Union, all slave, old and new, North and South. Men 
might have hailed him as the preserver of his country : 
men might have lived happily for a generation, for a cen- 
tury, in a country so saved : but what would have been the 
legacy to posterity? No, the likeness, even heightened as 
it was, two years after Lowell wrote, by the analogy of 
Henry's death by the dagger of Ravailliac in " the deep 
damnation of his taking off," is rather a striking contrast. 
Lincoln, wavering never, climbed higher by devotion to a 
loftier principle than he dreamed of. His legacy to his 
country is a united people purged of the great cause of 
dissension — all free. Think for a moment what France 
might have become if Henry had spent his great energies 
in securing full freedom to Protestantism, instead of mere 
toleration ; and had won not only that, but had succeeded 
in leaving a France wholly, permanently, gloriously Prot- 
estant. France might never had had a Richelieu or a 
Mazarin ; a Vendome or a Grand Monarch ; but she 
would have been spared a Voltaire and a Rousseau ; a 
Robespierre and a Marat ; and all the wretched ruthless- 
ness which sprang from that rabble devil-born rioting in 
the most terrible of revolutions. 

The greatest loss which as a people we are to experience 
in connection with Mr. Lincoln is the fading knowledge of 
the man as he actually was. To idealize him is to miss the 
lesson of his life. His birth, origin, self-education, home- 
liness of language, broad humor, were his very self. His 

27 



serene trust in God was as characteristic and not less his 
want of confidence in Man. Good old Puritan Calvinism, 
sprung, not out of the teaching of men, but out of the 
teaching of nature and the promptings of his own heart. 

His genial humour was an immense power. It warmed 
his personal relations with men ; it softened the Doric 
sternness of his mind ; it gave point and apt illustration to 
a policy which rose in itself above his advisers as well as 
his critics ; it was a shield to shelter half accepted truths 
from too close scrutiny, to protect a half developed policy 
from criticism at the wrong moment. 

Perhaps there is no more pertinent example of this 
than his famous reply to the Confederate emissaries at Old 
Point Comfort. He declined to treat for peace with the 
Confederate government. It had no legal existence. He 
was only willing to deal with the states and receive them 
back to their allegiance as the first step to negotiations. 
The emissaries entered into a lengthy and didactic dis- 
cussion of the relation of the question to constitutional 
law, and finally said : " There is a precedent for treating 
with rebels in arms, Charles I. having done so." Lincoln 
at once replied, " I do not very particularly recall the case 
cited : but I do recall that Charles I. lost his head." 

He was a man of the people and his career is the 
highest expression of the possibilities of popular govern- 
ment. As was to be expected, a certain homely penetra- 
tion, good nature, and hard-headed sense were among his 
equipment. It was the extraordinary breadth and balance 
of these powers which was so remarkable. Men of the 
people have frequently possessed a pungent, epigrammatic 
oratory but rarely touched with the tenderness which tempts 
to tears. This Lincoln possessed in the highest degree. 
His inaugurals are full of power. They go to the mind 
with a force that depends on nothing except the justness 
and truth of their statements. They do not so much 

28 



arouse enthusiasm, as stir the heart with a passion akin 
to sorrow. In his immortal address at Gettysburg he 
rises to a height which no other American orator has 
attained. It is epic in its fresh unpretentious strength, it 
speaks to the heart, not through figures and tropes, but in 
its own language and directly. Read this speech and then 
compare it with the funeral oration of Pericles, that splendid 
monument of Attic eloquence, and how much more soul 
stirring are the simple words of the American. The adorn- 
ments of the golden period of Greek rhetoric become tawdry 
in comparison ; they seem the tinsel of the tongue, not the 
beaten gold of the heart's full utterance. Compare it with 
Edward Everett's well nigh forgotten oration, to which it 
was meant to be but a "grace before meat" — and we see 
that the highest oratory is the expression of the feelings of 
the heart rather than the outgoings of the intellect. Let 
Lincoln's name be forgotten, let his memory become a tale 
that is told, and in some distant day let some unexpecting 
hand unearth this oration and his second inaugural address 
and men will wonder what mighty heart pulsed out such 
tender words ; what brain conceived thoughts of such simple 
grandeur. If our children are taught this brief oration, 
they will not let his memory die or his name be effaced 
from the roll of the good and great. 

If we compare Lincoln with those about him we see 
how he rises above them ; how he seems to dominate them 
because of his complete understanding of the relative 
importance of the problems of his age. When we contrast 
him with those opposed to him we begin to understand 
how great he was. One contrast is forced upon anyone 
who considers whence he sprang and to what height he 
climbed. He and Jefferson Davis were both born in 
Kentucky in 1808 and 1809. Both removed from Ken- 
tucky in childhood, Davis going to the Southwest, Lincoln 
to the Northwest. Both served in the Black Hawk war, 

29 



Davis as an officer in the regular army, Lincoln in the 
volunteers. Both were presidential electors in 1844, 
Davis voting for Polk and the extension of slavery, 
Lincoln for Henry Clay and the principles of progress. 
Both were elected to Congress, the one in 1845, tne other 
in 1846. Davis was inaugurated as President of the 
Confederacy February 8, 1861, Lincoln as President of the 
United States March 4, 1861. The details of such a com- 
parison are too many to be more than suggested here. How 
character rises above station ; conscience above ambition ! 

Set over against him by a strange destiny was another 
who seemed to possess as a birthright all that Lincoln 
accomplished. Born in Kentucky, the descendent of 
statesmen, rising step by step along the natural path of 
political distinction, in the Legislature, in Congress, in 
the chair of the Vice-President, John Cabell Breckinridge 
stood face to face with Abraham Lincoln as his competitor 
for the highest office in the gift of the people. The one 
Kentucky looked upon as the true heir — Isaac the son of 
promise — the other as Ishmael, child of the bond servant. 
The courtly Breckinridge, possessing every virtue which 
the nation delighted to honor, possessing every quality 
deemed necessary to produce a perfect statesman, the 
confidence and affection of all who knew him in private 
life, the admiration and good will even of his opponents 
in public life, handsome, courageous, eloquent; seemed to 
cast completely in the shadow that gaunt, ungraceful, 
uncouth brother who had wandered away from the old 
Kentucky home, who had delved in the virgin Western 
soil until he had become stained with its clay and marked 
with its ague fits, until he had come to love a fact rather 
than a figure of rhetoric, to value truth above tradition, 
and morality rather than political success. 

As they faced each other, there seemed no room for 
rivalry ; there seemed no possibility that having come 

3° 






along the paths which they had followed hitherto any 
man should turn away from that noble and attractive 
figure to embrace the views of his ungainly countryman. 
But nature sometimes sets her stamp of greatness on 
uncouth forms. The highest greatness with her transcends 
the graceful proportions and regular arrangements which 
are so pleasing to the well trained eye. Breaking away 
from all set rule she now and again raises to the very 
highest place one who possesses a spell which men call 
genius, but which God loves as truth. Love for a 
kinsman cannot blind me to the fact that he was wrong ; 
that he committed himself to the maintenance of an evil, 
which God had decreed should be blotted from the face 
of the earth ; while Lincoln with the power of profound 
conviction, and the vision of a true seer, took God for his 
helper and truth for his guide and led a perplexed people 
to the only conclusion consistent with righteousness and 
consonant with human progress. 

The vulgar mind delights in men of a single quality, 
and when it finds men of breadth and height, richly en- 
dowed by nature and nobly fashioned by circumstance, 
insists upon appraising them in a single phrase. But great 
men have atmosphere, that subtle indefinable quality which 
we call personality, that fine reserve which makes them at 
once the delight and the riddle of their time. Men do not 
know how to anticipate what they are going to do, because 
they cannot see with their eyes. Men cannot estimate 
what they did, because they only comprehend part of the 
plan and part of the performance. We may oftentimes be 
satisfied with the broken fragments of such men's per- 
formances and so men delight to fasten upon Lincoln's 
patriotism, his humanity, his humor, or any other of a half 
dozen conspicuous qualities. Forgetful for a time that he 
possessed other qualities as noble and as enobling. 

None of these is more engaging than his compassion. 

3 1 



Nor is it more often illustrated than in his frequent pardon- 
ing of deserters. Real as the compassion, the human 
sympathy, the kindness of heart that prompted him to 
these acts was, a large public policy lay behind them. He 
could hardly have withstood Mr. Stanton's severe criticism 
and open opposition, and the violent antagonism of the 
regular army, unless this had been the case. He well 
recognized that so dreadful a struggle taxing to the utmost 
the resources of the people, demanding volunteers and 
unpopular drafts, could not be carried through by drastic 
measures. It was necessary that the people should realize 
that the bitter business of the war was being done at as 
cheap a price as possible, and a wise and generous recog- 
nition that the homesick boy was not of much value in the 
camp as a soldier, and might be of a great value in the 
home, especially after he had recovered his moral tone, was 
a shrewd estimate of popular feeling, as well as a noble 
concession to the human heart. 

And indeed Mr. Lincoln knew how to reach the human 
heart. Sometimes he traveled the king's highway — as in 
the Gettysburg address — right to the castle gates and sum- 
moned it as a rightful lord ; sometimes he loitered by the 
winding way leading to the postern opened by jest and 
story, as when he read immediately before proposing to his 
cabinet his Emancipation Proclamation a humorous chapter 
from Artemus Ward. Sometimes he passed through the 
secret gate of sympathy and tears, as in his immortal letter 
to Mrs. Bixby. Always he found entrance where he would, 
even at last into the heart of Southern men and women, 
when his sympathy for an oppressed and enslaved race was 
transferred to a war-worn and exhausted people whose cup 
of bitterness he would fain sweeten with a just peace and a 
generous reconstruction. 

That he possessed in full measure the saving gift of 
humor sometimes obscures the fact which he forcibly 

3 2 



asserted for himself that he was no mere joker. " I believe," 
he said, " I have a popular reputation of being a story 
teller, but I do not deserve the name in its general sense, 
for it is not the story itself but its purpose or effect that 
interests me. I often avoid a long and serious discussion 
by others, or a laborious explanation on my own part, by a 
short story that illustrates my point of view. So the 
sharpness of a refusal or the edge of a rebuke may be 
blunted by an appropriate story so as to save wounded 
feeling and yet serve the purpose. No, 1 am no simple 
story teller, but story telling as an emolient saves me very 
much friction and disturbance." 

A man who plays both with laughter and with tears upon 
the cords of the human heart must be careful to keep his 
own heart in tune, responsive to every noble impulse. That 
Lincoln did this is the common testimony. The strongest 
evidence that can be given of this is his magnanimity, the 
largeness of mind which enabled him to make those who had 
been his political rivals his cabinet advisers, and to tolerate 
the bureaucratic manner of Mr. Stanton. The same quality 
appears in his dealing with Horace Greeley and the New York 
Tribune, and the radical members of Congress. It finds 
perhaps its fullest expression in his dealing with his two great 
ministers who would fain have been his rivals. We stand 
aghast to-day at the infatuation which prompted Seward to 
submit his "thoughts for the President's consideration" on 
the ist of April, 1861. Nothing could better illustrate the 
way in which the men who were close to him had as yet 
failed to take his measure. A violent man would have 
immediately dismissed the secretary. A weak man would 
have sought an opportunity of ridding himself of so uncom- 
fortable a companion. Lincoln proved his greatness by the 
quiet and courageous policy which retained the man in his 
position and taught the cabinet officer his place. Not less 
conspicuous was the generosity which at a subsequent time, 

33 



after Chase had been obliged to retire from the cabinet 
because of his extraordinary want of judgment and loyalty, 
led Lincoln to offer him the greatest office in the gift of the 
President. There are few men in the history of the world 
who could have done so magnanimous an act as to appoint 
Mr. Chase to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court 
of the United States when he was an avowed rival and a 
disgraced minister, and it only adds to the nobility of the 
deed that the appointment was an act as patriotic as generous, 
for there was no one better fitted to discharge the duties of 
that great office. This act proved Mr. Lincoln to be truly 
magnanimous. This noble word has not always had exactly 
the same significance, but it has always expressed qualities 
of mind and heart which our great President conspicuously 
possessed. Lord Bacon gave us a measure for a man when 
he said : " Magnanimity no doubt consisteth in contempt of 
peril, contempt of profit, and in meriting of the times wherein 
one liveth." And no man ever more perfectly filled that 
measure. 

I shall not dwell upon that dreadful hour which brought 
death swift, unlooked for, to close a half finished career. 
God who governs the destinies of men is inscrutable in his 
providence. Humanly speaking Lincoln's work was but 
begun. He alone had the grasp to hold the problems of 
reconstruction in his mighty hand : he alone could hope to 
pass through the dark days of doubt and jealousy and pain, 
wisely and well. No man ever died more inopportunely. 
No man has been more missed out of the counsels of the 
nation than he. I know it has been the custom to take a 
different view. Some have said that he saved his fame in 
passing away, because he was unequal to the task before 
him ; more appreciative critics have said that no future 
" could copy fair his past." To my mind he had hitherto 
but been fighting his way to a congenial sphere of work. 
For the work before him was congenial, fitted to his peculiar 

34 



powers of mind, and had his hand but been upon the helm 
the war echoes which long lingered in the hill country of the 
Carolinas, by the silent bayous of the Mississippi, and in the 
wild forests of Arkansas, had soon been lost in one universal 
jubilee. Our country is one. His fame is the possession 
of no state or section. To the white man of Carolina and 
Louisiana his labors brought a blessing quite as much as to 
the black man. Another generation will surely see this. 

The words with which President Lincoln closed his 
immortal address at Gettysburg may well constitute for us 
a sacred trust. "We highly resolve that they shall not 
have died in vain ; that this nation under God shall have a 
new birth of freedom and that government of the people, 
by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the 
earth." This new birth of freedom included a serene trust 
in the good providence of God, an abiding faith in the 
Union as free and making free, a courageous confidence in 
the ability of all men without regard to race or color to 
profit by free institutions, and a firm purpose that the black 
man established in his rights to life and liberty should be 
guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness. We may 
well count it a specific charge to us to see that the black 
man, no longer slave or freedman, but free born and with 
free born aspirations shall share the privileges of this great 
people once more united in prosperity under the good provi- 
dence of God. It is for us to see that his ignorance is 
replaced through systematic education, that his passions are 
subdued by moral training, that his capacities of mind and 
heart are called into activity by a generous sympathy, and 
that his manhood is challenged by a helpfulness worthy of 
the man who gave his life that this Union might be all free. 
The way of the cross has for us no rational explanation. 
As Whittier says: 

The healing of his seamless robe 
Is by our beds of pain. 

35 



If we would triumph with Him, we must also suffer with 

Him. 

The assassin dropped into the alembic the last bitter drop. 
The subtle alchemy of fellowship and love has made of that 
bitter draught the tonic of a new patriotism. 

We may not be able to explain, but our poets have 
enabled us in some measure to understand the blow that 
blasted forty million hopes. No one has caught the agony 
too deep for tears as Whitman has. But after the bitterness 
of his cry it is to Isaiah that we who have entered into the 
fruitage of his life must turn for an interpretation. 

O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we 

sought is won ; 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all 

exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim 

and daring; 
But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 
Rise up,— for you the flag is flung— for you the bugle 

trills ; 
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths — for you the 

shores a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass— their eager faces 

turning ; 
Here Captain ! dear father ! 
This arm beneath your head ! 
It is some dream that on the deck 
You've fallen cold and dead. 



My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and 

still ; 
My father does not feel my arm he has no pulse nor 

will ; 
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed 

and done ; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object 

won -, 
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells ! 
But I with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

" Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God. Speak 
ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her, that her warfare is 
accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of 
the Lord's hand double for all her sin." 



37 



KETTESLINUS, PHILADELPHIA 









ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



A Memorial Address 



